Video Showing Pandemic Crisis at Elmhurst Hospital in New York was Produced by Simulations Expert Leading to Questions of Authenticity

The Washington Post says some hospitals are withholding ventilators from Coronavirus patients who are struggling to breath, which is a death sentence for many of them. According to the paper, the reason is that the pandemic has placed so much load on hospitals that there is no choice. The basis for this is a video that portrays medical mayhem at Elmhurst Hospital in New York City – including a large refrigerator truck parked conspicuously at the rear of the hospital to receive stacks of dead bodies. The video emphasizes that they just don’t have enough ventilators. The head of NYC public hospitals, however, says Elmhurst has never come close to running out of ventilators, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo admitted on camera that New York has thousands of ventilators received from the federal government that are still in storage, because they are not needed at the present time. Meanwhile, citizen journalists have been going to hospitals all over the country – and in other countries, as well – and filming empty parking lots and waiting rooms in the #FilmYourHospital truth movement.

Dr. Colleen Smith, who produced the video, attended the NYU School of Medicine as a “Simulation Fellow” and gives lectures on medical-crisis simulations, raising the reasonable question whether her video shows a real or simulated event. -GEG

In the chaos of New York City, where coronavirus deaths are mounting so quickly that freezer trucks have been set up as makeshift morgues, several hospitals have taken the unprecedented step of allowing doctors not to resuscitate people with covid-19 to avoid exposing health-care workers to the highly contagious virus.

The shift is part of a flurry of changes besieged hospitals are making almost daily, including canceling all but the most urgent surgeries, forgoing the use of isolation rooms, and requiring infected health workers who no longer have a fever to show up to work before the end of the previously recommended 14-day self-isolation period.

Last week, DNRs or do-not-resuscitate policies for coronavirus patients who stop breathing, or are in cardiac arrest, were being discussed as part of worst-case scenario planning — ideas dismissed late last week by Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus coordinator, saying, “there is no situation in the United States right now that warrants that kind of discussion.”